How final chapters of mother and first love inspired novelist Ian McEwan to campaign for right of assisted suicide

The celebrated writer Ian McEwan is to become patron of a charity calling for the right of assisted suicide – and revealed how the deaths of two women he loved inspired him.

The 62-year-old, who won a Booker Prize with a novel about the issue, explained how he was most affected by the passing of his mother and first girlfriend Polly Bide.

He spoke of his anguish after watching his mother, Rose Lilian Violet, slowly deteriorate with dementia.

The deaths of his first girlfriend Polly Bide (left) and his mother Rose Lilian Violet (right) inspired Ian McEwan to campaign for the right of assisted suicide

‘My mother always said “I don’t want to be dependent on anyone and if I ever get Alzheimer’s do me in”,’ he told the Daily Telegraph.

And he said Miss Bide, whom he last year dedicated his novel Solar, impressed him by remaining active until her dying breath when she was overcome by blood cancer.

Mr McEwan said of her: ‘We lived together. We were undergraduates, fell in love and stayed close friends all our lives.

‘She spent the last few weeks of her life, even though she was in a terrible condition - myeloma - getting all the photographs out of drawers, writing captions under them so that the children knew who everybody was.’

Involved: Mr McEwan has written a Booker Prize-winning novel about assisted suicide

Next week Mr McEwan will announce that he has become a patron of Dying In Dignity, a campaign group calling for the legalisation of assisted suicide for terminally ill people.

He was moved to support the group after Ann McPherson, his doctor and lifelong friend who is dying from pancreatic cancer, began campaigning to revise the 1961 Suicide Act.

Mr McEwan described the 65-year-old daughter of a Jewish East End tailor as ‘inspirational’.

Ann is dying and she is doing it with extraordinary grace and dignity,’ the author said.

Mr McEwan last week called on author urged David Cameron to ignore the ‘supernatural beliefs’ of Christians who object to ‘assisted dying’ on religious grounds and introduce new laws to end ‘unnecessary suffering’.

He does not endorse assisted suicide being legalised for all – only those who have been diagnosed as terminally ill so that they can have a ‘good end, surrounded by the people they love’.

Last year the Director of Public Prosecutions issued new guidelines setting out the factors that make prosecution of someone who helps a loved-one die less likely.

Chief among them is the fact that the suspect had acted solely out of compassion.